Re: Gmail or Thunderbird problem?



On Friday 05 December 2008 11:11:18 Bart Silverstrim wrote:
CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
Bart Silverstrim wrote:
Karl F. Larsen wrote:
Yes that may be correct. I am still learning how IMAP works. There
is not very much information on IMAP that I can find.

What about IMAP is confusing?

Primarily IMAP is a way of keeping email on the mail server instead of
your computer so you can access it from a number of systems without
losing your mail, and as long as the provider does decent backups of
their data you won't lose data.

It's not "their" data. It's their client's data.

I'll remember that if the ISP is served with a warrant for data so
officials get the data but the client is never told of this being
served...courtesy of some of the wonderful laws our soon to be ex
president had passed for domestic spying.

In our hosting
operation, we don't back up client data unless they expressly want us to
do it and then we bill for it accordingly. Even if your hosting provider
says they back up your data, what would you do if their machine died and
their backup turned out to be not restorable, or if they went bankrupt
as the first hosting provider we used did about 13 years ago(*)? You can
scream, you can vent fury at them and you can even threaten to sue (but
not prevail if you did) but you'll still be without your data. The
prudent thing is to make sure that you always have a local copy of any
remote data that is valuable to you.

*shrug* the ISP's I've worked with here make backups of their email
server because they can be driven out of business if they have a crash
and lose services their clients use. *shrug* up to them how they want to
serve their customers.

Hosting is a little different since it means the client is taking
responsibility for management. I was just talking about ISP email,
though, as I didn't think most users would be administrating their own
hosted email service.

We backup email, but we only retain the backups for a week or so before they
get overwritten. When you number you email accounts in the hundreds of
thousand retaining all that data becomes onerous and expensive. Some
customers retain email on the server and some do not. If you take your email
off our servers when you check it, it is a safe assumption that all trace of
it is gone within a week. It the government wants us to save all this crap
they are going to have to come up with some dough. All our servers are in
colocation facilities for redundancy of banwidth and power. it is not as if
we can have someone there all the time to play with tapes.


--
Mike McGinn
Registered Linux User 377849
"more kidneys than eyes!"
Code wrangling for over twenty years.
"Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit."

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